New Zealand-born, London-based director Robert Wallace, AKA Parallel Teeth, has directed the animated music video for Auckland musician Merk’s song I’m Easy, premiered here on It’s Nice That. Starring an animated 2D cut-out version of Merk with fried-egg eyes, surrounded by bizarre characters illustrated by Robert and Caitlin McCarthy, the video has a lo-fi and nostalgic feel ideal for the track.

“Merk was open to the direction as long as it was super colourful and fun, but underneath all that happy stuff a little bit melancholic,” explains Robert. “The two main inspirations were Merk’s paper cut-out album cover and photos of him in his iconic egg glasses. Personally I wanted it to be bold, loose and playful.”

The singer was shot in his studio in New Zealand, and the footage was then cut out and coloured frame by frame, to give it a “rough and energetic” look. The illustrated clan of creatures were added adhoc to each frame in Photoshop, without a strict storyboard, in order “to capture the carefree naivety of early ideas before they were overthought,” says Robert, and allow the video’s narrative to evolve organically.

For Julien Dyne’s track Hours, animator Frances Haszard has created a music video that takes place in the incoherent mind of somebody post-breakup. “Like when you lose someone you love and get stuck in memories on loop and every mundane object seems to be a trigger for some memory,” explains Frances. The video began as a series of illustration she created while listening to the song. “I wanted to push some of the lyrics to be really literal in some parts and in others I drifted away,” says New Zealand-born Frances.

Animation director Alex Grigg is a man on the rise. Newly signed to Blinkink, Alex recently moved to Florence, Italy, where he has no doubt spent the summer enthralled by one of the most beautiful cities in the world. That’s not to say he hasn’t been hard at work though: consider his latest release Dear B.I.G.

The Romance of the Skeleton is a two-and-a-half minute, weird and wonderful animation depicting “the lows and lower lows of love in the afterlife.” Equal parts funny and touching, the short is the result of a collaboration between Brazil-born Vitoria Bastos and Adele Davies from Devon (a small town famous for its carpets to be specific). Although from very different backgrounds, the pair bonded over alien abductions, UFOs and a shared interest in weird, sexual and deliberately ugly work – interests which are clearly reflected in the project. Having barely spoken while studying the same course (Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins), the collaboration came about as a way to get out their frustrations with the “final year grind and the inclination towards polished and commercial work.”

Growing up, illustrator and animator César Pelizer was surrounded by comics, magazines and cartoons on TV, so his interest was piqued early on. “I still remember that episode from Bugs Bunny where he interacts with the animator and Bugs gets angry that he keeps drawing and erasing things from the scene, for some reason I saw that and thought I could do that,” says César.

Born in Brazil, he then went on to live in Argentina and years later moved to England, where he now calls London home. César is currently working as a director at motion studio weareseventeen and sees his style as a mix of 2D and 3D. “I like to use 3D more as an animation tool rather than looks, I like keeping things flat,” explains César. “At the moment I am really enjoying experimenting with 3D, basically having a 3D character is like having an actor in scene, you can position the camera in different angles and perspectives and that gives you infinite possibilities, especially if you’re coming from an illustration background like myself.”

In a series of films for IKEA’s future-living lab SPACE10, Barcelona-based studio Six N. Five has created a futuristic and abstract depiction of living space through immaculate hyperreality. Comprising six 15-second films that combine in sequence, the CGI series is set in a vast, light-filled warehouse. Each starts off seeming like a very real location, all white walls and wooden floorboards, but as the floors start to warp and the walls concertina inwards, it quickly becomes apparent this is far from reality.

A couple of weeks ago, millions of Americans gazed up into sky, wearing protective glasses of course, to marvel at the first solar eclipse to go from coast to coast in the US in nearly a century. The phenomenon, which turns day to night for several minutes, is perpetually fascinating and in Hannah Jacobs’ animation for Vox she explores our wonder and curiosity for eclipses.